Ratatouille

Shortly before his death in 1966, Walt Disney looked at the rushes of The Jungle Book and said with a sigh: 'I don't know, fellas, I guess I'm getting a little old for animation.' In fact, he hadn't produced a cartoon of the first rank for more than 20 years, not since the great early quintet of Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi

Another 25 years were to pass before the Disney Studio embarked on a second cycle of great animated films in the age of the computer-generated image. It began with Beauty and the Beast in 1991 and led to the creation in 2001 of a new Oscar, for best animated feature.

Since the mid-1990s, this new Golden Age has come to be dominated by the Pixar Animation Studios, which had started out in 1979 as largely a computer hardware organisation. In 1995, Pixar made its first full-length feature, Toy Story, released through Disney and now a sub-division of the Disney Organisation. Each of its films to date has been a major popular and critical success, and its latest, Ratatouille, is arguably its finest yet, a tale exuding good taste and civilised values that centres on a rodent. A rare case of Roedean meeting Rodine.

Rats have rightly had a bad press throughout history, carrying plagues around the world, terrifying Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four and universally loathed, though the puppet Roland Rat enjoyed a vogue on television after saving a crisis-troubled TV station from extinction, and Sinatra and his disreputable chums proudly called themselves the Rat Pack. Mice, on the other hand, have always been thought cute and lovable, idealised by Beatrix Potter and providing the Disney Organisation with its corporate symbol. The Disney company is popularly known in the film industry as 'the Mouse', so it must have seemed an amusingly subversive notion to make Remy, the hero of Ratatouille, not only a rat, but a highly sophisticated one. Moreover, he's a native of that 'Old Europe' so roundly condemned by Donald Rumsfeld, and a citizen of France, whose most significant contribution to America's fast-food cuisine was for a while redesignated as 'freedom fries'.

To put a serious interpretation on a hilarious, fast-moving picture, Ratatouille is about education, aspiration, collaboration and the challenging of stereotypes. Remy is a rural rat who discovers he has remarkable gifts of smell and taste, which his loving, hard-nosed dad (voiced by Brian Dennehy) insists should be used for the benefit of the pack by sniffing out poisonous materials among the garbage they feed off. 'But why should we steal food or live on waste stuff?' Remy asks.

In a country cottage occupied by an old lady, he watches the TV shows of Parisian restaurateur Auguste Gusteau, author of Anyone Can Cook, which encourages him to experiment, initially using the smoke from the cottage chimney. But in a superbly orchestrated sequence, the outraged old lady takes a shotgun to the local rats, driving them into a sewer that takes them towards Paris. Separated from the others, Remy finds that fate has led him to Gusteau's restaurant which, since the death of its owner and because of the animosity of imperious food critic Anton Ego, has lost two of its stars and become stultified.

The ghost of Gusteau, a Jiminy Cricket conscience figure who describes himself as 'a figment of your imagination', becomes Remy's companion and, first by accident, then by design, the rat sets about restoring the restaurant to its old status. As he can't reveal his identity for fear of closing the place down, he works through the dim but likable Linguini, a garbage boy who's in fact Gusteau's heir.

Remy sits under the lad's toque, directing him by pulling his hair, and rapidly turns him into a star. He renews the restaurant's repertoire, but excites the suspicions of the top chef (voiced by Ian Holm), who wants to take the place over and, a very sly joke here, uses Gusteau's reputation for a fast-food franchise exploiting every form of world cuisine.

The movie becomes something of a thriller as Remy fights to retain his disguise and a suspense story in the way he contrives to woo Ego, who looks like a cross between the great Louis Jouvet and novelist Will Self, and is spoken by Peter O'Toole at his plummiest.

There are some almost serious moments, as when Remy gets lost in the city and discovers what an outcast he is, and when Ego gives a little disquisition on the nature of criticism. The film is constantly dazzling in its graphic inventiveness, both in the frequent chases and in complex setpieces like the kitchen being operated by dozens of rats under Remy's instruction. The latter brings to mind WP Frith's detailed paintings of busy Victorian life and also Martin Handford's Where's Wally? books.

As for the magnificent food, in its animated form, it has that surreal quality of food and fruit in paintings that pleases and satisfies in itself without exciting desire or hunger.

The Pixar people aim both to please audiences and to fulfil themselves as artists. As in their previous films, they provide a marvellous curtain-raiser, in this case a 10-minute film called Lifted, a comic take on Close Encounters. An apprentice pilot of a flying saucer, assigned to make an alien abduction, botches an attempt to beam up a sleeping boy from a prairie farmhouse and his extraterrestrial supervisor has to take over.

This little gem puts you in the right mood. Then, at the end, the credits (which name everyone at Pixar from the animators to the lawyers) are accompanied by beautifully drawn backgrounds, even though the producers are well-aware that few people will stay to watch them. That's true self-respect.